God wants all of us to keep moving forward so we can be in step with Him as He does new things. He Isaiah 43:18-19,
"Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; Shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert."
Many of us, however, don't go forward with God. We keep going back to the past for some reason and because of this, not only do we render ourselves unable to move forward, we also disobey God Himself.
Some of us may argue that we're not "going back to the past" but in reality we're not moving forward either. We're stuck in the denial zone, denying the fact that we haven't let go of the past so that we can move forward.
This also is a wrong thing to do.
Friends, I hope to see all of us moving forward to the new things that God is doing now. And with this article I hope to help us with that.
In this article we're going to look at some ways we tie ourselves to our past and get ourselves stuck where God doesn't want us to be.
Some ways we tie ourselves to our past and disobey God
1) When we keep looking back to "better days"
Many of us are guilty in this.
Are you the type to say, or at least think of, yesterday as better days? Like, "yesterday was better than today" or "I guess I'll never experience such happiness/joy/excitement as what I experienced before"?
If you are, then you've got to stop doing that. Think of Lot's wife who looked back because she couldn't leave her life in Sodom behind her (see Genesis 19:26).
Yes, we all have good experiences in the past, but we should not be stuck in them. We must not long for "the good old days" because better days are ahead for us in God.
2) When we pattern today and tomorrow after yesterday
When we base today and tomorrow's possibilities on yesterday's events or happenings, we won't get to where God wants us to be.
Ever read in the Bible how God changes lives? Let's take the apostle Paul, for example. Before becoming a passionate Christ-follower, he was a dreaded persecutor of Christians.
Believers dreaded him so much, they wouldn't even accept him into the church when he got born again (see Acts 9:26)!
If Paul defined his today and tomorrow by what he did yesterday, he wouldn't be able to write most of the New Testament. He let Christ define him, not his past.
We have to look beyond ourselves, including our past choices and decisions. We have to look at Christ. God's mercies are renewed every morning -- why not look at these instead? (see Lamentations 3:22-23)
3) When we are fearful of and unable to embrace the new things that God wants for us
Lastly, when we dread or fear the unknown future, even to the point of losing faith and trust in God for what we can't foresee and predict, we naturally turn to our comfort zones: What is familiar.
Friends, many of us Christians are unable to run towards the goal that God has set for us because we're contented to stay within our comfort zones. We don't want to go beyond what is familiar to us because we fear what we don't know.
Did you know that because of this, we tie ourselves tightly to our past?
Think about the man we know as the father of faith, that man named Abraham. God told him to do something that many of us would be utterly terrified to do:
"Get out of your country, from your family and from your father's house, to a land that I will show you." (see Genesis 12:1)
God told him to leave his comfort zone behind, and with it is his familiarity, his youth, his childhood memories, his friends, his life before God called him.
If Abraham didn't leave as God told him to, we wouldn't have the nation of Israel. And without the nation of Israel, we wouldn't have the Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ the Son of God. Think about that.
